


Gravitational Pull

by heresie_irisee



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/F, Fantasizing, Pining, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-26
Updated: 2011-10-26
Packaged: 2017-10-24 23:47:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/269261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heresie_irisee/pseuds/heresie_irisee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It seems all she does these days is <i>want, want, want</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Compass

**Author's Note:**

> This is basically one big mixed metaphor, which is apparently what happens when I try to write ~feelings~. but hey, at least it has femslash. Of a sort.
> 
> I'd be grateful for any and all feedback; I really don't know what to think of this one.
> 
> oh, and have [a visual](http://heresieirisee.tumblr.com/post/37273921543/cant-bear-to-look-at-it-anymore-so-finished) for my Erika and Charlotte!

People never realise how much metal they actually carry.

Glasses. Buttons. Zippers. Belts. Jewellery, watches, hair pins.

Bras.

That's the way it has always been, and by all rights, it shouldn't be distracting. To Erika, the small bits and pieces of iron and steel that complete a human being's outer shell are simply part of the awareness that another person is present. She can see them, she can hear them, and she can feel the metal on them; unless she's hunting, she doesn't even notice it.

But then again, she notices everything about Charlotte.

Charlotte, who is entering the kitchen, sleepy and soft around the edges in a way that Erika never is, but already fully dressed. Erika has never seen her in anything but reasonable skirts and shirts both buttoned high enough to hide any hint of cleavage and fitting tightly enough to utterly fail to conceal just how generous Charlotte's chest is. When they'd first met, dripping wet and shivering from the freezing seawater, the white material had been translucent and plastered to her skin; that was the first time Erika had _noticed_ , but she hadn't paid much attention at the time – now she wishes she had taken in the sight, memorised every dip and curve of the magnificent, infuriating creature that would draw her into her orbit. It was the most she'd ever see of Charlotte's body, and she can't even remember it clearly.

Charlotte is always buttoned up; they've been living in the same house for three weeks, and Erika doesn't know what she wears to bed. If she wears anything to bed.

Time after time, day after day, Erika _notices_. The riveting blue of her eyes, the soft fall of brown locks across her back, the red of her mouth. Her deep voice, so at odds with her friendly, youthful face. The belt holding up those modest skirts, the delicate chain disappearing under her collar, the thin wires supporting her breasts, oh-so-close to her warm, bare skin.

She's wearing a garter belt today.

Erika can picture it so easily.

They'd be kissing, and she would finally figure out whether Charlotte wears lipstick – whether kissing her would get it smeared over both their mouths or whether she'd be able to watch those lips get redder and redder with each searing kiss, each nip of her teeth.

The buttons would go first, flung away one by one, revealing one tantalizing strip of flesh at a time. She'd untangle her hands from Charlotte's thick curls to run them slowly down that pale throat, then lower, and lower still, until it would be time for the belt to go, bringing the skirt down with it. She'd hear her moan at that, deep voice hitching up just for her, almost whimpering – but not quite, not yet.

She'd pull away to admire her handiwork – prim and proper Charlotte Xavier leaning against the wall, flushed and panting, gaping shirt hanging off one shoulder, clad in her lingerie, still wearing her heels; her eyes would open slowly, pupils blown wide – and Erika would close in again, stroking the silk of her stockings, her inner thighs, and when she'd put a hand between her legs she'd already be wet, so wet—

"Erika?"

And she's looking at her. She's not blushing, she doesn't even look unsettled, wearing her usual serene, confident expression; untouched by the horrors of the world, always ready to laugh at something, a corner of her mouth quirked up, one eyebrow raised slightly. Erika is almost positive nothing of her musings had transpired on her face, but with a telepath—

"Yes?"

"Hank here" she nods in his direction; he's looking at the floor, avoiding her eyes, "was asking how much metal you can usually move, outside of combat situation. He put the final touch to the blueprints last night."

"It – varies." And wasn't that a nuisance, too, her inability to master her own gift, the power that she feels in her _blood_ should belong to her, without the switches and levers that her creator had given her when he'd wrenched it out of her in the first place.

"Depending on?"

"On how angry I am, mostly." She feels ridiculous calling it that. It isn't anger, isn't even rage, or fury, or wrath. _It_ has been the driving force behind every action, every thought for so long – it transcends language.

"And does your emotional state affect your precision?"

She has to think on that for a moment. "I've never tried _building_ anything while I was angry enough to move a substantial mass. But," she looks Charlotte straight in the eye, defiant in a way she'd rarely felt the need to be before she met that soft-hearted, unsettling, brilliant idealist, "it's never affected my aim."

Charlotte nods. She nods, and she doesn't avert her eyes, doesn't bite her lip, doesn't look understanding or sorrowful in that condescending way of hers – she doesn't do any of these things, but Erika can tell that she wants to, and it sets her teeth on edge and brings an ache to her chest – like everything Charlotte does and says and thinks, and everything she _doesn't_ do or say or think, it brings out the best and the worst in Erika. Her need to protect and build, her urge to destroy and punish – Charlotte makes her feel like a battlefield, and she can't even tell which side is best and which side is worst, until she has to remind herself that no matter what Charlotte says, things are not _good_ or _bad_ ; things just are.

She wants to pin Charlotte to the floor by her watch and her bracelet, her necklace and her fucking _garter belt_ , and she wants Charlotte to hold her close until it all goes away; she wants to rob her of everything she's ever had, and she wants to gift-wrap the planet and lay it at her feet; she wants to lock her up and teach her how cruel the world can be, and she wants to lock her up so she'll never, ever learn it.

It's tangled and it's bloody, a constant undercurrent to her thoughts. A month. They've met a month ago, and already Charlotte is as all-consuming a presence in her life as Schmidt, or as the magnetic North.

The sun rises every morning, she will kill Schmidt or die trying, and she wants Charlotte Xavier.

Erika feels with everything she has, everything she is. She works in absolutes and doesn't do half-measures. But Charlotte has woven herself into every part of her with effortless smiles that Erika can't help wanting to return, grand ideals that Erika has to tear down before they fall on their own, hopes for the future that Erika, for the first time in as long as she can remember, actually dares to share, even just a little. Charlotte, who dived into the sea to keep Erika from drowning, and refused to let Erika push her away, and made everything that ought to be clear black-and-white into a swirling, conflicted grey.

Charlotte knows. She _must_ know. Erika is split apart, the inner landscape that she has so painstakingly built in the last sixteen years (stark plains and wide roads paved with fury and pain, all converging towards a single point: a coin through Klaus Schmidt's head) reduced to rubble by the vicious battle; from Charlotte's point of view, she is probably howling with it.

She is a compass needle, and suddenly, there are two Norths, both equally overwhelming.

Every fibre of her being is clamouring for Schmidt's blood and pleading for Charlotte's _everything_ , and the end result couldn't be anything but deafening.


	2. Moth

Sometimes, it's a torture not to look.

Erika commands attention. She has charisma where Charlotte has charm; she never conceals her strength, while Charlotte always does; she is hard and steely, even here at the kitchen table, and utterly self-sufficient. Charlotte feels soft in comparison, vulnerable in a way that she hasn't felt since she was twelve and met Raven in her kitchen, since she finally found someone to protect.

With Erika, she has to remind herself that she is powerful instead of having to remind herself that she is fallible – but for all that she could make Erika walk out of a window if she wanted to, she feels helpless in the face of her own fascination.

Erika burns bright, brighter than anyone she's ever met; great blinding flames of determination and certainty, kept ablaze by a neverending supply of pain and outrage, outright rejection of the world as it stands. She is burning now, and she will be burning later today, building Cerebro; she'll be burning late at night over a game of chess, arguing and putting all her fire in her voice; she will go to bed burning, and wake up burning tomorrow morning.

And Charlotte, Charlotte is the moth drawn to that flame, circling it again and again, trying to get closer and closer, entranced, fascinated, irrevocably pulled in as the flame burns on, concerned only with her own combustion.

She can't tell whether she wants to blow out the fire and keep Erika from being consumed whole, or fan the flames for fear that Erika will die out with the last of the embers.

But if she is honest with herself (and she rarely is, twirling plumes of prevarications and rationalisations acting as a smokescreen), what she truly wants is for that fire to burn for her, too; she wants to shape it and control it even as she is shaped and controlled in turn, and if that means leaving Erika, herself, and the whole world scorched and barren, then so be it.

It's strange to look clearly at her own desires after so much time fleeing from them; but all of her shame and all of her fears seem irrelevant, laughable, dwarfed as they are by the all-consuming allure of everything Erika does and says and _is_. She is a force of nature, and the myriad ways Charlotte wants to worship at her altar are as natural and inevitable as the tide, the only conceivable response to what lays in front of her.

She wants to wrap herself around Erika as completely as she is able, wants to know every one of her thoughts, to share every minute she has lived and every second she has yet to experience, dream her dreams and ward off her nightmares; she wants to breathe the air falling down from her lips, trap her within the circle of her arms and legs, explore every inch of her skin, spend night after night learning every trick of her body until she can make it writhe and thrum with pleasure at will. She wants the fine architecture of her bones and the coiled muscle overlaying it, wants to rake her nails down her ribs and tongue tenderly at her breasts (she always imagines that they're sensitive, a remnant of softness in the fortress of Erika's body), wants to see her spread out on Charlotte's bed, to lick a slow path up those long, long legs; wants Erika to pin her down and fill up every inch of her consciousness.

But she knows she'll never have any of that. Between her moth and Erika's fire, there's a glass pane that she erected herself, that she's grateful for even as she bumps against it. She wants to break it down and leap into the furnace, wants it badly enough that she knows she mustn't do it.

She resolutely ignores the faint trickle of surface thoughts that make it past her shields, only aware of wordless emotions that she can't block out, and keeps her power leashed tight. It's a good thing Raven has always been so repulsed by the idea of letting Charlotte into her head – it had made for good practice. If she allows herself one taste of that singular mind, she doesn't know she won't give into temptation and lose herself in it.

It would be breaking her promise, and she can't afford that, can't afford to lose the small amount of trust Erika puts in her. For now it's thin and fragile, tentative, like cobwebs; but she can feel it strengthening bit by bit, infinitesimally thicker with every question she asks that she could answer by taking a quick look, every sentence she misinterprets. She treasures every single strand of the web, enough that nothing would be worth breaking them. Not even sinking into that marvel of a mind.

She tries not to think about the rest. She's always been acutely aware of the righteous disgust homophiles bring out in people – more aware than she would have liked, even before meeting Erika, even before admitting to herself why that disgust pierced through her more strongly than any other.

Seeing it on Erika's face, feeling it rolling off her in slimy, sticky waves that would cling to everything they touched, everything between them – she wouldn't be able to bear it.

It's all too powerful for her to pretend it isn't there as she usually would (as she has until now, burying infatuations with classmates or professors under mountains of academia until they were extinguished), but she's a good actress. Had to become one, when she was younger and her shields were faulty, to look people in the face after seeing their deepest shames and most urgent desires.

So she plays the part of Doctor Charlotte Xavier, eternal optimist and lover of the scientific process; virtuous and chaste without trying, charming, kind and understanding, principled as a matter of course, confident and determined – convinced that in the end, everything will turn out all right, because she believes in her fellow man. She wears the role like a second skin, an acceptable substitute for the real Charlotte underneath, the one prone to addiction and obsession, who doesn't want to look at things in the face; the one who can't afford to think of the filth of hatred and selfishness that litters the human heart if she wants to be able to get out of bed in the morning; who wants to save people just to be their saviour; who _knows_ that things will turn out all right because she is prepared to bend every one of her self-imposed rules to make it so, and knows it will be easy. Who touches herself every night and comes with Erika's name stuck in her throat.

She pours herself some coffee, hopefully strong enough that she will stop feeling like a soft creature exposing her underbelly to Erika's razor-sharp gaze; plasters a smile on her face for Hank in the hope that he will _finally_ stop skittering awkwardly around them; doesn't drink in the sight of Erika's strong, lean body, aware that doing so would only leave her intoxicated and all the more parched, like good whiskey.

She focuses her attention back on the plans for Cerebro, watches Hank grow long-winded and effusive the way he only ever is when speaking of his projects. But in the part of her mind that stays trained on Erika's every move, she sees her withdrawing from the conversation, focusing on _something_. It's a something that brings out a slew of intense, conflicting emotions, and she can guess what it is. Shaw. Always, always Shaw. And she can't help drawing her back to this kitchen, back to their plans, back to _her_ , reminding Erika that she, they, can help her find him, help her bring him down; making herself an integral part of the path to revenge.

She'd rather feature in Erika's thoughts as an accessory, a tool of the hunt, than not at all.

And Erika speaks of anger and she speaks of aiming, magnificently and frustratingly unapologetic, one of a million reminders issued every day that she refuses to be bent out of shape and remoulded into somebody more tactful or more conciliating. Refuses to be tamed, no matter what.

There's a fierce beauty to the refusal, but _God_ , it doesn't stop Charlotte from wishing she could do it anyway.


End file.
